I hate coming to the end of a friendship, and that's the feeling I get when I come to the end of a good book. As I near the end, the sensation of loss hovers over the book as tangibly as the scent of nutmeg and cloves over a pumpkin pie.
I love reading, but the older I get, the harder it is to find books by those authors I have turned to all my life. Agatha Christie's Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, Margerie Allingham's Albert Campion, and Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver are characters I've enjoyed since my kids were babies.
These authors kept me company when the colic wouldn't let a child sleep, or when my husband was in the hospital or away working out of town. They spoke, even then, of a world past, a world more orderly, and substantially more monied than mine.
They let me escape to a place where the charming young couple always got together in the end, and the murderer was always exposed and received his or her just desserts. At the end of the book, the world was restored to its calm, measured pace.
In my mind, Miss Marple and company were very astute detectives. Unlike the current gamut of mystery tales, their kind did not overload the reader with pages of technical information about forensic science or modern techno-gadgets or the history of crime families in New York or London.
This is an important aspect of my respect for the old school--just imagine Kay Scarpetta attempting to solve a mystery sans technology and her years of university training. That is not to say that I don't read Ms. Cornwall's books--I do: I just find them dark and unrelenting.
As for my friendly books, I usually find them on the crammed shelves of a thrift shop, or sometimes in reprints in the library. I always feel a little thrill of discovery when I see one.
It's like running into an old friend, and once home, I curl up and open the book, savouring the texture and colour of the worn pages even before I begin to read. I linger in the book, reading just a few pages a day, savouring every moment until, with the last page, the friendship ends.
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